About a year and a half ago I was speaking to a couple of client-side people who were asking me which LSPs might be able to handle services that, while related to translation, were not traditionally services handled by the translation and localisation industry, either because of tradition or because they were emerging services resulting from new/changing customer needs. This got me thinking that perhaps translation services or localisation services are too limiting and that “language services” might better represent what customers are demanding…not to mention offering the potential for diversifying the services we offer.
I happened to bring this subject up during a meeting with Inger Larsen, of the recruitment company Larsen Globalization, and she said she had had a similar experience. After swapping stories we decided to undertake a survey to find out if these were one-off needs or if buyers of translation services were viewing our services from a broader perspective than our industry does.
Our survey consisted of the following two questions:
- Which non-translation services are you currently buying?
- What services would you like your translation vendor to provide that they aren’t currently providing?
We polled buyers from a broad range of industries including IT, software, life sciences,e-Learning, online travel, consumer products, web design, marketing & PR, e-commerce, and games.
Although there were some “outlier” responses, we were surprised to see a certain amount of consistency in the responses we received. The services mentioned could be divided into three groups: linguistic, technical and a bit of both.
Desired Linguistic Services
- Local authoring for content marketing (translation and transcreation)
- Assessment of test translations and sampling
- MT & MT editing skills
Beyond Translation – Services Delivered
- Multilingual social media monitoring
- Creation and publishing of web pages
- Software testing
- Testing mobile apps on various devices
- CMS
- Interviews with employees in different locations to assess language skills (to decide support centre location)
Beyond Translation – Services Wish List
- Local authoring for content marketing (copy-writing)
- Restructuring XML files to better facilitate localisation
- App search optimisation best practices for each local market
- SEO and SEM
- Advice on which (Asian) languages to localize into
Innovation
We also received feedback on innovation that buyers would like to see from their LSPs. We consider most of these to be consultancy services, but could certainly be another source of revenue.
- Information on the latest market trends?
- Insight into innovation by other companies
- Which workflows to cut/optimising workflows
- Knowing client businesses as well as or better than they do.
- New MT engines for badly supported languages and industries
Conclusions
Our first conclusion was that, based on our research and market trends, there are a number of new or unexplored areas that LSPs may want to consider as revenue streams, especially if these services are a natural extension to existing services, target markets or areas of interest. We also concluded that many of these services help the LSP migrate away from per word rates and charging by the hour or service bundle. The following grid summarises and categorises them as linguistic, technology or a combination of the two.
We also concluded that the industry’s definition of itself might be a little bit incorrect. Just as we had localisation springing from translation, it seems now that we are entering a new phase. We think the next term should be more all-encompassing, because it seems that buyers are viewing it more and more as language services rather than simply TEP + maybe DTP.
We should embrace this change, as it is opening up new frontiers for us to grow, expand or migrate into. It offers greater opportunities for today’s current suppliers to differentiate themselves by capitalising on their existing strengths and/or developing new competencies. This is nothing new to the industry. Who understood the finer points of translation memory in the late 1980s? We had to adopt this change or risk losing business to competitors who did. The only constant is change and we are in the midst of some rather significant change. With change comes opportunity and it’s time to seize the moment. You’ll have more to offer and (very likely) have new and happy customers.